Captivity, Conflict, and Ambiguity in Lydia Sigourney’s “The Lost Lily”
Written by Jessica Mehr

In her 1854 poem, “The Lost Lily,” American sentimental poet Lydia Sigourney tells the story of a young girl who is kidnapped by the Miami Indians, then discovered by her siblings over fifty years later as a fully-integrated member a the tribe. The poem offers at least two possible readings. One is a Christian captivity narrative in which Native Americans are depicted as essentially inferior, noble but violent savages that need white Christians to civilize and redeem them. The other reading reveals Christian hypocrisy and questions the superiority of white America. At the same time, the poem’s ambiguities offer another, more subversive reading that reveals Christian hypocrisy and questions the superiority of white America.

Many of Sigourney’s poems show great sympathy towards the plight of Native Americans, critiquing the practices that have almost annulated their race, and using sentimental devices such as apostrophe and direct address to rouse the reader’s emotions and prompt moral action (Kete 117). In the poem “Our Aborigines,” for example, personified elements of nature (forests, mountains, etc.) ask where the Indians have gone, as if nature misses them, even if civilization does not. In “The Indian’s Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers,” Sigourney depicts welcoming the first “weak, invading band” of settlers as a grave mistake by the Indians that ushered in the demise of their race. While she displays great compassion towards the natives, Sigourney also seems to believe in American progress and has internalized the prevailing Indian cultural stereotypes of the time. As Eric Sundquist points out in his book, Empire and Slavery in American Literature, “Widespread cultural perceptions” were held “of the American Indian as a ‘child’ of nature—both innocent and given to uncontrolled violence” (Sundquist 69). They are viewed as “noble, courageous, and independent,” but also “improvident, childlike, superstitious, vengeful, and thus a threat to stable and complex social order” (Sundquist 74).

Sigourney’s poem, “The Lost Lily,” repeatedly characterizes Indians according to these stock tropes, contrasting white, Christian civilization against their dark and unruly pagan culture. The poem opens at Lily’s childhood home in Wyoming, which is depicted as a cultivated oases in the untamed frontier, “lonely, yet pleasant,” with a “small garden” (5), a “cultured bush/of ripening berries” (5-6), and even an apple tree (8). Nature, tamed by white settlers, is lush and idyllic, but devoid of sublime dangers.

Our first view of Lily is at age seven. The youngest of three siblings, she is characterized as a “pale,” “fair,” and “fragile” flower (22-23), deserving of her name. She is a child of great sensibility, gazing on her mother with “intense regard” (19) and responding to her stories with a “quick, intermitting sob” (20). Her mother, also “frail” (48), is the ideal pioneer wife; pious and loving, she has left the comforts of her “own, beloved New-England” (27) to pursue the great American project of taming the West. Their small Western home is juxtaposed with the progress that has been made in New England, where civilization is marked by formal education and religion. The mother tells her children about her childhood school and church, which was “canopied” by elms and sounded a “sweet bell” that roused the “neatly-clad” community to workshop God together (27-39).

It is during the mother’s storied image of a perfect, New England civilization led by God that the “darkening shadow” of a “savage” intrudes flashing a tomahawk (43-45). This violent and seemingly unprovoked invasion, coming immediately following a discussion of God’s love, makes the Indian assailant seem devil-like. This demonization continues as the “grim pursuers” hunt the family like animals and then “cleft” the mother down (48-50). Yet despite his “ruthless rage” (70), the Indian assailant spares Lily and takes her with him. This act is not depicted as compassion, but an “impulse” (51), a “capricious mercy” (53) that happens to move “the sternest purpose of the red man’s breast” (52). Lily’s family sees her captivity as a fate worse than death, “shuddering” with the thought of what violent “horrors must mark her lot / If life were hers” (79-81).

Instead of experiencing horrors, Lily is assimilated. This is the greatest fear of the American captivity narrative. As Eric Sundquist explains, “the captive’s gravest risk was not death but rather the temptation to identify with the alien way of life and become a savage” (Sundquist 115). Fifty years after Lily’s abduction, her brother and sister hear of an old white woman living with a Miami tribe. Their journey to find her is depicted as a quest to reclaim Lily’s Christian and American identities. They make a religious “pilgrimage” (96) from their civilized Wyoming home deep into the depths of untamed nature, a land of “cloud-capp’d mounts,” dark forests, “bridgeless rivers swoln to torrents,” and prairies that seem infinite “like the never-ending” (98-100). The invasion of this virgin territory by Lily’s brother and sister is symbolic of its destiny: to be traversed and conquered by white settlers. By juxtaposing this wild landscape against the cultivated imagery of Lily’s childhood home, "The Lost Lily" implies that the taming of the frontier is positive progress.

When her siblings arrive, Lily has "gone native" both emotionally and physically. The once delicate flower has grown desiccated, a coarse and “wrinkled woman” (105) with “shrivell’d lips” (107). This lack of hydration, caused by the flower’s removal from Christian civilization, becomes a recurring theme. Just a few lines later the “fount” of Lily’s being—her old, vibrant self—is seemingly aroused by the sight of her siblings, as if she has maintained a few “kindred drops” of fluid, so persistent that they have “wrought out / A separate channel” (111-112). The use of “kindred drops” conjures the image of blood. Although she is a full-blooded white woman, Lily’s intermarriage seems to have racially polluted her body so that Lily has separate "channels" now; she is Indian with a few drops of white blood.

Lily has assumed not only the physical traits of tribe members, but also their behavior. No longer possessing the sensibility of her girlhood, Lily is stoic for the duration of their visit. Overcome by their Christian sensibility, her siblings sob, tremble, and partake in sentimental exclamations: “Dear sister! Praise be to god above!” (114-116). Yet Lily is unmoved by a “responding tear” and refuses to “answer their embrace” (120-122). Lily claims that the initial “lonely captive’s pain” she experienced when abducted passed away long ago (135-137). She has a created a native domestic space. “Here is my home,” she tells them. “These are my daughters” (138-139). She then describes her late husband, the tribe’s chief as the quintessential noble savage, with the eyes of an “eagle,” the heart of a “lion,” and the fearlessness of a true warrior (141-143). Because Indian culture here is not really being seen through Lily’s eyes, but Sigourney’s, the narrative once again falls back on white cultural stereotypes.

The siblings begin a tug-of-war that pits white, Christian ideals against Lily’s pagan, Indian culture. The images Lily’s brother and sister conjure of her childhood are closely linked to Christianity: her “blessed mother’s voice,” her father’s “prayer” to God (127-130). Her brother counters Lily’s claim that she is happy in her native domestic space by describing his own “happy home” and “loving wife and children” (146-147). He then lapses into a commanding, almost biblical diction and irregular meter as he begs Lily and her daughters to come, “Back to thy people, to thy father’s God” (145, my emphasis).

For a moment, her brother’s Christian sentiments seem to move the drops of white, Christian blood that still lurk within Lily: “A trembling nerve / Thrill’d all unwonted at her bosom’s core” and her lip turns white (153-155). But this is quickly countered by the “reproachful” gazes of her daughters, as the “proud Miami chieftain’s blood” silently rises to their cheeks (156-157). Again, it is as if Lily’s half-blood children have somehow tainted her. She is filled with “the moveless spirit of the race she loved” (159) and her features physically transform back to those of a stoic Indian woman with no “touch of sympathy” (161). She looks upon their Christian, familial love with “the stony eye of prejudice” (189), gathering “coldness from an angel’s smile” (190). Lily has realized the greatest fear of captivity narratives: she has identified so strongly with the alien other that she has lost her race, religion, compassion, and with them, her superiority. Despite her siblings’ “faithful zeal” (178) that Lily will come around, she has officially “gone native,” and they eventually must leave without their “pagan sister” (193). Continuing the imagery of desiccation, their last wish at the end of the poem is that God will “water” any “seed” of Christianity that remains in Lily’s soul (197-199).

While there is a great deal of textual support for reading this poem as a traditional Christian captivity narrative, there are two ambiguities that create the possibility for a more subversive reading: a speech Lily delivers on Christian hypocrisy, and an unusual lack of sentimentality on Sigourney’s part. In defense of the Indian life she has built, Lily tells her siblings:

Upon my head

Rest sixty winters. Scarcely seven were past

Among the pale-faced people. Hate they not

The red man in their heart? Smooth Christian words

The speak, but from their touch we fade away

As from the poisonous snake.

Have I not said

Here is my home?

…

Shall I turn

My back upon my dead, and bear the curse of the great Spirit? (162-169, 172-174).

This speech provides our best window into Lily’s perspective, and is the one moment in which Indian stereotypes fall away. Her words reveal the hypocrisy of Christians and Anglo-Americans who, like her siblings, speak “smooth words” of God’s love, but regard Indians as violent savages in their heart. Lily’s siblings are engaged in similar hypocrisy. They wish to complete their domestic circle by wrenching Lily from hers; they assume that Lily cannot be happy with the tribe because white society is better and she is “above” their race—that the Spirits she speaks of offending are inconsequential compared to a Christian god. Lily’s words also raise some startling ambiguities. Is this speech merely a performance for her Indian daughters, during which she is actively suppressing her genuine, Christian identity? Or, does her lack of a concrete racial category lend the words more truth and credibility? Who could better to judge the hypocrisy of white settlers towards native tribes than a woman who is part of both categories?

Lily’s speech reveals that she sees her identity as constructed more by environment than biology; she has spent more of her life with the tribe, so she is therefore more like them. This implies that Indians may be removed from their environment and have their social and biological status raised, just as Lily's is presumably lowered. While they are an inferior race, Sigourney implies that not only should they be civilized, but they can be. If the Indians are to be saved though, Christians must feel compassion for them and at least partly see things from their perspective. Lily’s brother and sister fail in their quest to save Lily’s soul because they fail to understand her and the world in which she has spent most of her life. They speak with biblical diction, and focus on what they shared as children, but shy from everything that Lily has become, speaking of her “prejudice” but ignoring their own.

Sigourney creates ambiguity not only in the content of her poem, but also its form. After reading her other poems, one cannot help but notice the drastic lack of sentimental tropes in “The Lost Lily.” There is no apostrophe or direct address to the reader. While the brother and sister engage in sentimental rhetoric, the narrator of the poem never does. Instead of diminishing the distance between reader and speaker through direct address, the narrator distances us from any one character’s perspective, but also stays out of the narrative herself. As readers, we passively witness the poem unfold, with no moralizing conclusions or entreaties from Sigourney. The poem is written in blank verse, but it is more narrative than lyric, and the use of alliteration, assonance, and consonance make it feel fluid and natural. The use of more subtle poetic devices allows the reader to look past the poem’s artifice, and this creates a tone of emotional honesty that many of her other poems lack. If the poem is a plea to convert the pagan savages, it is quite restrained for Sigourney. The narrator’s failure to interject after Lily’s speech with sentimental moralizing or interpretations, lets Lily’s words stand ambiguously on their own, leading us to question the primacy of white, Christian culture.

Ultimately, one cannot help but ask: has Lily actually been lowered, as her brother and sister assume? Lily’s speech makes even her denigration ambiguous. In many ways, she has done just fine outside of white civilization. She is no longer a frail and beautiful flower, but she is strong. She has survived the loss of her first family, at least four pregnancies and the death of two sons and her husband. While as a child she was a paragon of feminine delicacy and virtue, she is now the embodiment of what an Indian woman should be: tough, useful, stoic, and loyal to her people. Unlike most Native American tribes, her community is still quite isolated, and does not seem to be immediately threatened by white violence. There is nothing to indicate that Lily isn’t just as well off where she is than she would be with her siblings.

It’s almost as if in “The Lost Lily,” Sigourney has abandoned her mission of creating sympathy for the Indian cause through sentimentalism. She undercuts her own assertions of white superiority, and offers a much more pessimistic view of the future. While the poem implies that it is possible to save the Indians, its somber tone leaves little hope that Christians and Native Americans will ever succeed in overcoming their prejudices to achieve religious, cultural, and national cohesion.

Works Cited

Sigourney, Lydia. The Western Home, 1854

Sundquist, Eric. Empire and Slavery in American Literature: 1820-1865. University Press of Mississippi, 2006.